Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) (9 page)

Among the more
revealing, if disturbing, memories he’d uncovered were those from Kaelus
involving conversations with Satan. The demon had been incarcerated in Hell
since the Great Schism, but he often was visited by the true master of Hell,
Satan Himself, who would discourse with the shackled Kaelus for hours or years
on end. The memories were often hazy and purely vocal – Kaelus had few visual
memories during his incarceration, and none involving Satan – but Birch went to
great lengths to document every word he could glean from the demon’s mind. The
potential insight they might give was impossible to overestimate, and Birch
periodically had to remind himself that nothing Satan said could be taken at
face value. The master of evil, counterpart to the divine God, had gone to
great lengths to hide His existence from every demonic immortal being, and such
a master of deceit was surely playing His own game with every word He spoke.

Of course, Birch
had had his own conversations with Satan, many of which he was still struggling
to remember himself. They were jumbled amidst the worst of Birch’s memories
from Hell, and he often wondered just how much of them he really wanted to
recall.

Of the twenty
years Birch had been in Hell, six of them had been spent under the worst
tortures ever devised by man or demon; thankfully, Birch still only had hazy
memories of those agonizing years. The other fourteen years, however, were
spent traversing the endless, lifeless landscape of the immortal plane. Time
passed differently there, so Birch had only aged the ten years that had passed
in the mortal realm. As far as anyone knew, Birch was the only mortal to ever
return from Hell; at least until the Black Viscia had emerged, leading the
unholy horde during the Barrier War. The corrupted, apostate paladins were a
literal black mark against the ideals of the Prismatic Order.

Birch felt
something scratching against his leg, and he looked down but saw nothing.
Before he could look up again, something gray and hairy crashed onto his desk
and nearly upended the ink well. Birch hastily retrieved the tottering bottle
of ink and glowered darkly at the gray rat grinning at him from atop the paper
on which he’d just been writing.

“Selti,” Birch
said in exasperation, “if you’ve smeared that ink I’m going to shave your furry
hide and make a hairpiece for Nuse.”

Selti hissed at
him in disbelief, but carefully stepped off the inked paper. Birch saw only a
few small smudges that weren’t worth getting upset about, so he contented
himself with a stern frown at his small companion.

“Back to your
drann shape,” Birch ordered, “and behave yourself.”

Selti had the
grace to look ashamed of himself, and the sight of a rat looking so downcast
nearly made Birch laugh despite his irritation.

“Come on now.”

The gray hair
retracted and solidified, then hardened into reptilian scales as the rat grew to
the size of a housecat. His tail lengthened and was covered with its own
scales, and two leathery wings quickly took shape and spread over half of
Birch’s desk. Selti lowered his wings and looked up at his paladin hopefully.

“Better,” Birch
said, and reached forward to scratch the creature under his left eye. “I’m very
impressed with your new abilities, of course, but if you could be a little less
of a nuisance about them, I’d appreciate it. Sometimes I wish you were as
well-behaved as your mother was.”

Birch sighed.

Selti’s behavior
had grown more and more erratic lately, and Birch was sure it had something to
do with his sudden ability to change his shape at will. As a dakkan, Selti
naturally had the ability to change from a dragon-like shape to a wingless
“runner” about the size of a horse, which was more suited for ground transport.
Additionally, dakkans could shape-shift into one other animal shape. Studies of
wild dakkans showed they usually chose some sort of predatory animal, such as
hawks or faerers. Many chose the shape of a drann, cat-sized creatures that
resembled the natural, dragon-like shape of dakkans, and scholars speculated
that the change felt more comfortable for them.

The drann shape
was also popular among domesticated dakkans, which the paladins exclusively had
used as their mounts for centuries. The other most-common shape was that of a
horse, since it tended to blend in better when a paladin was traveling amongst
the general populace.

In the months
since Birch had returned from Hell, Selti had been his mount, following in the
footsteps of his dam, Sultana, who had given her life to protect Birch in Hell.
Birch had left her corpse, not knowing that Selti was nearly ready to be born.
On his journey back out of Hell, Birch had found the scrawny dakkan starving
without any hope of sustenance on the lifeless plains of Hell. He found another
baby dakkan lying next to Sultana’s corpse, but it was stillborn.

Whether because
of the unique circumstances of his birth or from some other reason, Selti had
always been different from other dakkans. He seemed more intelligent, for
starters, but even more important, he had always been able to transform into
two shapes – both a drann shape and a horse – which no other dakkan had been
known to do. Birch kept Selti’s unique ability a secret, having decided it made
no real difference and would only raise questions he couldn’t answer.

But now, since
the end of the Barrier War, Selti had exhibited the ability to change shapes
into any creature he’d encountered, it seemed. Where the new ability came from
was beyond him, but Birch was sure about the timing. Two days after Hell had
passed over the mortal plane, Selti had copied the shape of a passing dog.

A week after
Selti first started changing to multiple shapes, Birch tested his companion’s
abilities by showing him a caged faerer, and only minutes later Selti had
copied the creature’s shape exactly. Only the color was different – no matter
what shape Selti assumed, he was always a dark shade of gray.

Birch supposed
that was fitting, since he was the one and only Gray paladin. The gray cloak
and Birch’s fire-filled eyes had marked him as a man apart ever since he’d
returned from Hell.

“And it’s all
because of you, Kaelus, isn’t it?” Birch mused aloud. Having a demon living
within was bound to have strange effects on a man’s physical body, to say
nothing of his soul. Birch took some comfort in the knowledge that Kaelus was,
at heart, a servant of good rather than evil, despite his demonic nature.

That goodness
was more than an academic concern to Birch, who now had a sliver of the demon’s
āyus
bonded to his own body and soul. Immortals reproduced much
like taking a cutting from a plant, which would grow into a new, separate
entity of its own. Kaelus had given Birch that “cutting” from himself to save
Birch’s life after he lost a duel with the general of Hell’s armies. No one was
sure yet how the demonic
āyus
would develop within Birch, nor what
effect it would have on his identity.

Selti,
apparently bored by the lack of further response from his paladin, ran up
Birch’s arm and settled himself across his shoulders. The drann rubbed his
reptilian head up against Birch’s hair, chirping contentedly as he relieved an
irritating itch behind his ears.

“Ready to go to
bed?” Birch asked. Selti trilled in response. “Me, too.”

Birch pushed
himself wearily to his feet, covered the gnomish lamp and left the small study
he’d appropriated for his use. He locked the door and pocketed the key, then
turned and nearly ran over a small, green-cloaked man who was standing behind
him.

“Perky?” Birch
asked tiredly as he regained his balance.

“Oh, sorry to
startle you, Birch,” the Green paladin said in a bright voice, despite the
obvious weariness on his face. Birch had never figured out how Perklet could be
so upbeat all the time. He was quiet as a mouse and rarely said more than a few
words at a time, but there was an almost youthful innocence and eager
helpfulness about the middle-aged man that perplexed Birch. Even when he was
tired, as he certainly looked now, it was there. If nothing else, he certainly
fit his nickname.

“Not at all, I’m
just tired from a long night writing,” Birch replied, waving off the man’s
apology.

“Night? It’s
well into morning now,” Perklet said. “You really should rest.”

“My thoughts
exactly,” Birch said with a patient smile. “Were you looking for me, or were
you just entranced by the rather plain-looking knocker on this door?”

“Oh, I was
hoping you’d come with me to look at something,” Perklet said. He suddenly lost
most of the vibrant energy he’d had. “Some of our brothers died during a recent
expedition, and one of the other paladins asked me to take a look at the
bodies. Supposed to be something strange about their injuries, and I’m one of
the most experienced Greens around these days. Anyway, since we’re talking
about demon-inflicted wounds, I thought maybe you could take a look as well.”

Exhaustion
warred against the desire to help a friend, and in the end Birch’s own
curiosity tipped the scales in the Green’s favor.

“Alright, I
guess I can take a quick look before I go find my bed,” Birch said. “Where are
they being kept?”

“Just a couple
hallways down,” Perklet said. “It shouldn’t take long.”

Birch motioned
for Perklet to lead the way and reached up to placate Selti, who warbled
discontentedly.

“Speaking of
exhaustion, you don’t look all that fresh yourself, Perky, if you don’t mind my
saying,” Birch said.

“Oh,” Perklet
said with a sigh, “I was summoned in the middle of the night to help with a
difficult birth. Seven hours in labor, and we lost the child.”

“I’m sorry,”
Birch said soberly. “Stillborn?”

“Might as well
have been,” Perklet said disconsolately. “Poor little girl cried out once then
just collapsed dead in the midwife’s hands.”

- 4 -

The two paladins
entered the room slowly, mindful of the presence of three of their slain
brothers laid out on wooden tables. The room smelled strongly of death and the
cloying fragrance of some flower petals someone had laid out in a futile
attempt to mask the odor emanating from the three corpses. Fortunately, someone
had apparently opened a window recently, so fresh air was circulating in the
room.

The only other
living person present was a Yellow paladin Birch immediately recognized as
Michael Semnriak, another friend of Danner’s. The three men exchanged friendly
handclasps and a few murmured greetings, then Michael stepped back and let them
each examine a body.

Birch
immediately noted the distinctive claw marks left by demon-kind. The flesh
around the wounds was sickly and usually became infected almost immediately,
but none of these wounds seemed to be serious enough to have killed the
paladin. Birch shifted his attention then to the man’s head, half of which was
apparently missing and had never been recovered. Birch’s stomach tightened at
the gruesome sight, but he’d seen as bad and worse during his lifetime, and
this was sadly nothing new to him.

“It looks almost
like as sword wound, doesn’t it?” he heard Perklet murmur from behind him as
the Green paladin examined one of the other bodies. Birch silently agreed.

Or at least, it
resembled a wound from a sword with such an unimaginably sharp blade that it
left a perfectly –
perfectly
– smooth path cut in its wake. The angle of
the cut was such that Birch would also have expected to see a similar wound in
the man’s shoulder, but there was nothing. If this
had
been the result
of a sword, whoever had held it had a more exact control of his blade than any
man Birch had ever met, and he’d crossed blades with the best swordsmen the
Prism had to offer.

His exhaustion
momentarily forgotten, Birch reached forward with one hand to run a finger down
the sheered-off portion of the dead man’s skull. When he touched the bone,
however, Birch jerked his finger back as an intense pain seared through his
hand, as though someone had focused the heat of Hellfire and poured it all into
one spot on his flesh. The jolt of…
something
surged through his body in
the time it took to blink his eye, then as Birch was still recoiling in pain,
Selti jerked awake from his perch across Birch’s shoulders and launched himself
into the air. He flew agitated circles around their heads, scolding the Gray
paladin furiously. Absorbed in the growing agony in his finger, Birch ignored
the drann entirely.

“Are you all
right, Birch?” Michael asked, having noticed his reaction. Perklet turned in
concern and sucked in his breath at the sight of Birch’s finger.

The flesh all
around his forefinger was blackened as though intensely burned, and Birch could
only stare in shock at the sudden injury. Perklet immediately wrapped one hand
around Birch’s outthrust finger and murmured a healing prayer. About the same
time the full sensation of pain finally reached Birch’s brain, it was swallowed
by soothing relief and a few seconds later, the finger was whole again. Even
after the blackened flesh was gone, however, the three paladins continued to
stare at Birch’s finger.

“What was that?”
Michael asked. “What did you do?”

“I just touched
the wound,” Birch said in a stunned voice. “I barely brushed against the cut in
the skull, and it felt like I was touching the sun.”

“But nothing
happened when I touched it,” Perklet said, staring back at the corpse he’d been
examining. “It felt unnaturally smooth to me, but that’s all.”

“No one else who
looked at or touched these bodies reacted like that either,” Michael said. “We
even had Danner take a look. He said there was something abnormal about them,
but he couldn’t place it.”

Birch frowned
and took a deep breath as he finally looked away from his now-healed hand.